


Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

by Cerusee



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Dad, But somehow I ended up visiting like the four stations of the Bruce and Jason cross, Gen, and a bad cook, this was supposed to be just fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 16:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18720970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: Jason and Bruce, over the years.





	Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Bruce wrinkled his nose. “Damn,” he said, looking down at the scorched meatloaf. “Sorry, Jay.”

“It smells okay,” Jason said, leaning over the pan. “Mostly.” He boldly stuck a finger into it, and then drew it out and licked it. “Tastes fine.”

“Don’t—“ Bruce internally swore. Alfred would be beyond irritated if he’d seen Jason do that. God help him if Jason got food poisoning from this— “Jay, it’s not cooked through.”

Jason shrugged as best he could, with one arm bound tightly across his chest in a sling. “Cook it some more, then.”

“It’s already burnt.” Hadn’t he swallowed his pride enough tonight? Balducci’s would deliver to Bristol, even without notice. God knew, he tipped enough.

“Only on the outside,” Jason said. “Couldn’t we take out of the pan, and, y’know...” He whipped his good hand back and forth through the air, in a clean horizontal motion. “We could cut it in half, put it on a pan with the raw stuff facing up and cook it more?”

“Well, maybe,” Bruce said, hope sparking in his heart. The _broiler_ , now that was a possibility. Bruce was familiar with the concept. He’d never used a broiler for cooking _food_ , but it was a simple matter applying heat to protein, wasn’t it, and if he could reason backwards from the results of heat-treated proteins at a crime scene, he could surely operate a broiler and a pan of meatloaf, couldn’t he? 

***

“This is good,” Jason said, twirling linguine left-handed with remarkable dexterity. He stabbed a couple of stray capers and a lemon rind with his fork, before it made its way to his mouth. “I still think we could have saved the meatloaf, though,” he said, with his mouth full of pasta.

“ _Hnh.”_ Bruce rested his chin on his hand, and watched the fire crew work in the kitchen. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” The scent of smoke was still heavy across the front lawn, even as far out as they sat, with their impromptu picnic of Italian take-out. 

Bruce took a bite of garlic bread, then snuck out a hand to steal one of Jason’s medallions of veal right out of his plastic container of piccata pasta.

He should have known, from the subsequent extended silence, that Jason was only waiting for the exact _perfect_ moment to take revenge by shoving a zeppola down the back of Bruce’s shirt.

The shrieks of laughter, as Jason fled across the lawn, while Bruce grasped awkwardly at the pastry sliding down his back, almost made the various frustrations of the whole evening worth it.

Bruce was going to make sure, though, that come laundry day, Alfred would know who to blame for this particular disaster.

***

Bruce dug carefully around Jason’s head, brushing splinters of wood and pebbles of granite away from the injured flesh. The smoke was still so thick; it choked him. _I’ve got to get him to cleaner air_ , he kept thinking, even though only one of them was breathing and it wasn’t Jason.

***

He didn’t have time to linger, not on the night Bludhaven all but died. The smell of that explosion was almost lost. The memory of the night was muddled, and almost lost. ( _Dick_ had almost been lost.)

Sometimes, though, he would happen across a smell that seemed to be from that night, and it would make his whole body tense, and make something go sharp, so very close to his heart.

***

“What the _hell_ are you doing—“

Jason looked up from the bonfire he’d built on the lawn, wreathed in fiery wisps of paper that darted up and all through the breezy evening air. “Oh hey,” he said after a moment. Bruce could smell the alcohol on him several feet away. “Just.....uhhhhhh.....burning my inheritance. Is all.”

Bruce fixed him with a flat stare.

“You,” Jason said slowly, pointing his finger at Bruce, “told me. That I could do. Whatever I wanted.” He hiccuped. “This is what I wanted.”

“You—“ Bruce had to stop himself speaking for a moment. “ _This_ was the best thing you could think of to do with that money?”

It made him grind his teeth. Not because there wasn’t enough of it to go around, not because he’d miss the sum Jason had to have been literally setting fire to here, in an act of naked spite—Bruce himself could have burned millions in cash and regretted nothing but the stinking pollution of the air.

....and Jason would have been the first person to yell at Bruce if he’d ever been deluded or decadent enough to set fire to money. 

Jason would _never_.

Bruce looked up, and watched a bright orange flake of paper settle on his hand, as gentle as a Monarch butterfly.

He looked at Jason. “Monopoly money?”

“Monopoly _cards_ ,” Jason corrected him. “Those get-out-jail-free cards always pissed me off.” He blew on a floating fragment of one in the air, vindictively.

“I wish you’d stop setting fires,” Bruce said. He meant to say more, but that seemed to cover it in the moment.

Jason dropped down into a sitting position, and stared at the fire, which was barely even skeletal logs underneath its flickering, colorful paper additions, a foundation that to Bruce’s eye looked ready to collapse at any moment. “Me too,” he said morosely. 

Bruce sat down opposite Jason, and watched the faltering fire with him.

Neither of them fed it, and after a while, the logs gave way to embers, and the embers gave way to lingering smoke.

They watched the smoke rise, until it, in turn, finally thinned into almost nothing. Bruce fought back the urge to cough.

“Did you give it all away?” Bruce asked Jason, as peaceably as he could, when they were walking back towards the house.

“ _No_ ,” Jason said, sharply. “I’ve been poor, Bruce. I’m never gonna be poor again. Not _ever_.” He kicked a loose branch unfortunate enough to be in his path. “But I did give a lot of money to a foundation yesterday—I think it was yesterday—and then I got upset about it and I got drunk because I was so upset, and it just seemed like a reasonable thing to set fire to the lawn.”

“That was a terrible idea,” Bruce said, bluntly. “Come in. I’ll make you breakfast.”

Jason eyed him, all but sober, now. “I seem to recall you can set fire to water.”

“Meatloaf,” Bruce corrected, with dignity. “Which is actually flammable. And it was only the one time.” _That you know of._

“Hmm,” Jason said, thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll take my chances, then.”


End file.
